Loot

Social media allowed ISIS to bombard screens across the globe with propaganda videos. But behind that campaign was a lucrative black-market network exploiting Syria's precious ancient past. But in their relentless pursuit of ancient Syrian treasure, will dealers, auction houses, museums and collectors finally acknowledge that their cash was directly funding murder and mayhem?

2003. Baghdad falls. Over the 36 -hour period the Iraq Museum is unprotected, 15,000 antiquities are stolen. The cash raised from their sale will be used by terrorists to fund a deadly campaign. These treasures from the ancient lands of Mesopotamia are irreplaceable. Their value to the story of human history? Beyond measure.

A tiny fragment of papyrus worth more than its weight in gold is the beginning of the end for superstar Oxford don, Dirk Obbink. It's the latest chapter in the pillage of Ancient Egypt, where looting is a way of life. Police lay bare a billion-dollar black-market sacrificing children's lives in the hunt for the pharaohs' treasure.

It's a routine day for the customs officials at Memphis Tennessee airport when they pry open a shipment labelled "tile samples". What they find inside is a priceless collection of antiquities looted from archaeological sites across the Middle East. The consequences of this scandal will hit home for one of America's most powerful business dynasties - the Green Family of Hobby Lobby fame.

Curator of the J. Paul Getty Museum's antiquities collection, Marion True, is in disgrace. Her downfall is brought about by jet-setting antiquities dealer, Robin Symes, and his lover and business partner, shipping heir, Christo Michaelides.

December 2021 - Michael Steinhardt, the largest private collector of antiquities in the world, is forced to turn over $70 million dollars' worth of stolen loot and banned from collecting for life. Steinhardt's undoing comes after a four-year investigation into the connection between Sicilian organised crime and the trafficking of antiquities, known as Operation Demetra.

Douglas Latchford is the go-to expert in Khmer antiquities, plus, he makes a pretty penny as a dealer. But he's also a man of many secrets.  When news breaks that he's accused of being the mastermind of a multi-million-dollar racket in loot stolen from Cambodia's killing fields, museums and collectors across the globe face the grim reality that they're in possession of stolen property.

2012. The search of a flat in Munich, owned by elderly recluse, Cornelius Gurlitt, uncovers one of the most extraordinary stashes of lost art.  It reveals how Gurlitt's part-Jewish father, Hildebrand, struck a deal with the devil - and became an art dealer for Adolf Hitler. How do museums and collectors today justify holding onto art stolen from Jewish families murdered in the Holocaust?